Unless
one lives in the alternate reality of religious beliefs, it has
become impossible to deny and ignore a simple fact: very soon,
perhaps within only two decades, humans will join the crowded groups
of endangered species. While polar bears, lions, and elephants are
solely the victims of men’s cruel and reckless stupidity, humans
are collectively both the perpetrators and the ultimate victims of a
self-inflicted mass genocide. We, and that is all of us who consume,
procreate, and function within the parameters of a capitalist
system driven
by permanent economic and population growth, have behaved since the
mid-19th century industrial revolution like millions of termite
colonies eating away our own house. In less than 200 years, humans
have managed to put many thousands of years of fairly harmonious and
acceptable impact on our host planet and other species in jeopardy.

The
anthropocentric notions that humans can either save the planet or
“make our planet great again,” as expressed by the demagogue and
new French president Emmanuel Macron, are both arrogant and stupid.
The planet will be fine when we are gone. It is the survival of
our own species, and thousands of other ones in the process of being
decimated by human activities, that is at stake. In time, once the
wounds inflicted have healed, perhaps after thousands of years, new
species will emerge from the destruction of a man-made
post-Apocalyptic world.
For many scientists, 2100 seems to be the breaking point when the
bite of climate
change events
might be so severe that it is conceivable that most of the earth’s
surface will be uninhabitable.

Hell
on Earth

Fires,
floods, droughts, famines, mass migrations and lawlessness are
not mere worst case scenarios of doom and gloom in the forecast, they
are already here and will only exponentially intensify as billions of
people have to move from flooded coastal areas or the sun-scorched
vast stretches of land which will make the 1930s United States Dust
Bowl era landscape look like the Garden of Eden. As the social fabric
disintegrates, people will fight for basic survival necessities: that
is for food, water and shelter. If for decades, extreme
weather-related events have affected mainly
the poor worldwide,
this is about to change as climate negative events reach a critical
mass and become the great equalizer between rich and poor, as well as
prosperous industrialized nations and developing ones. By 2050, when
the ice caps have melted at both Poles and the glaciers are gone,
some of the priciest real estate in the world, such as New York City,
Miami, London, and Hong Kong will be around six feet under water
worthless ghost towns.

While
reversing or stopping the auto-destruction process is not an option,
urgently and collectively slowing it down should be the only absolute
global priority, to delay a fraction of the horrendous collective
pain to come. The recent exit of the Donald Trump administration from
the so-called climate change Paris Agreement provoked an uproar
among the pseudo environmentally aware people in the international
community. The truth of the matter is, the Paris Agreement consists
of vague politically correct talk, but with no binding commitment to
a vast array of the draconian actions needed; as such, it is as
effective as putting a bandage on the Titanic. As an example, both
London and Paris are planning a ban on gasoline and diesel vehicles
within the city parameters in 2040. This is, evidently, another case
of too little too late ineffective measures. The technology of non
polluting electrical cars has been available worldwide for decades,
but was never pushed aggressively enough on consumers by lowering the
manufacturing prices and through tax incentives, as well as
prohibitive taxation on hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles.

2100:
The year of living very dangerously

It
is rather ironic that it took the election of some climate change
deniers in the US to push the scientific community and the
international mainstream media to become finally more honest and
candid about the already dire consequences of climate change and the
upcoming global environmental collapse which, let’s be blunt,
cannot be avoided. Two scientific studies were recently
published. Both are still a little bit too cautious in their language
and fail to consider overpopulation as a major factor, but short of
sounding alarmist like they rightly should, there is an unusual, not
very scientific business-as-usual, sense of urgency. Both papers
define 2100 as a breaking point benchmark and are meant to be wake-up
calls for comatose policymakers and a generally dazed global public
opinion. The scientific facts are sobering to say the least, but the
idiotic giant will stay asleep and eventually die.

One
study in Nature establishes
that there is 95 percent chance that global warming will be higher
than two degree Celsius (2 oC) by 2100. Further the paper shows that
the likely range of global temperature increase is in fact between 2
and 4.9 degrees Celsius. As our colleague Dady Chery pointed out back
in 2012 in “Climate
Change: Dying by Two Degrees,”
a surface temperature increase of two degree Celsius and above is the
certitude of an imminent ecological system collapse on Earth. Another
scientific paper in The
Lancet was
strictly focused on Europe, as it was financed by the European
Commission. The key point of the extensive study is that
weather-related disasters are likely to affect 2/3 of the European
population annually by 2100. The study estimates that 152,000 deaths
due to climate events could occur annually in Europe by 2100, as
opposed to 3,000 for the reference time bracket of the paper, which
were the years 1981 to 2010.

Desperate
measures for precarious survival

The
zero-growth hypothesis, or even better negative growth, both
economically and in terms of population, should have been a global
goal a few decades ago when the runaway train of our own annihilation
could still have been derailed. In regard to population, the
one-child policy introduced in 1979 by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping
was the right idea and should have been emulated worldwide.
Unfortunately, it was not pursued even in China, where the unpopular
policy was phased out in 2015. In 2017, despite the unquestionable
evidence of the catastrophic outcome for all, we are still largely
completely oblivious and behaving like it is business-as-usual, by
extracting resources, producing, consuming, and breeding
ourselves to extinction.

This
simply amounts to collective suicide as well as criminal neglect from
people who still have the urge to procreate in a world on the verge
of collapse. Why inflict the pain and sorrow of a bleak future
on the unborn? According to UNICEF, each day more than 350,000
babies are born worldwide. Those born in 2017 will join the ranks
of 7.5
billion populating
this planet. Forty years from now, the landscapes and nightmarish
conditions of existence could be similar to those depicted in
post-Apocalyptic movies like Mad
Max 2: The Road Warrior, or Waterworld.
But are there any possible contingency plans of survival for at least
some of us when Earth becomes unlivable?

Some
extremely wealthy people, such as the CEO of Tesla Motors, have
mentioned space colonization as an option. This seems completely
unrealistic, unless they consider putting a giant space station into
orbit around the earth and strictly restrict its use to VIP. Food
supplies could be provided by growing food in greenhouses and
breeding livestock and fish. After a few decades, the station would
start to fall apart, and the confinement would give the mega-rich the
notion that they are living in a golden cage in orbit. More
realistically, vast subterranean dwellings might be considered. The
technology to dig very large and deep shelters is here. After all,
French and English engineers were able to dig the Channel Tunnel.
One can imagine a network of underground cities powered by solar
panels on the surface as well as a systematic collection of rain
water. Large greenhouses and plenty of livestock could accommodate
the population’s needs. The cities could be connected by tunnels to
share resources, information and some form of governance. Beside
subterranean solutions, other options, made possible in principle by
our technology, such as floating and subaquatic cities could be
considered. By 2150, billions of humans will more than likely have
died from our own follies and the criminal ineptitude of our
so-called leaders, both in government instances and private
corporations worldwide. If we quickly work collectively on some
contingency plans, life for the survivors will be challenging, but
perhaps a very small percentage of our number could courageously
pursue the human adventure.